A certain amount of luck keeps things exciting, but too much luck - good or bad - feels like heads-I-win-tails-I-lose. Third, I think there's too much luck in the game. I find myself save-scumming rather than throwing a couple of hours of tedious grind down a hole just to essentially recreate the game I was playing before. In Rimworld, instead of feeling excitement to start my next colony, I find myself just bored by the prospect of playing the same early-game elements all over again just to get to the part of the game which requires creative input. But in NetHack, if my cockatrice-wielding tourist dies, I can cleanse my palate so to speak by switching classes with an entirely different skillset in an all-new dungeon. As I mentioned, as a long-time veteran of roguelikes I'm not unfamiliar with instant unavoidable game overs. Second, there's the grind of getting yourself back to where you were. When things go haywire in Dwarf Fortress it feels exhilarating to watch all your careful planning fly apart like springs out of a broken cuckoo clock when things go haywire in Rimworld, it just feels like schadenfreude on the part of the developer and I'm not quite sure why. The knowledge that any game can end instantly due to nothing under my personal control is actually a really good way to induce what psychologists call "learned helplessness," with the net result of creating a negative emotional aversion to playing the game.
#Rimworld zzzt generator#
A random number generator shouldn't have the power to just throw up a "game over" screen. That or some variation of that happens often enough that I find myself putting the game away for days to get over the bad taste in my mouth. I think it may be the way the game is designed to throw multiple challenges at you at once because of the stochastic nature of the game, they often interact with each other in ways which feel punitive and sadistic, such as hitting you with plague which knocks down half of your colony instantly, then throws an infestation in the middle of your doctor's bedroom and kills him instantly, causing his grizzly bear to go insane and murder the only people not lying in the hospital. Game mechanics can be challenging without feeling like they're screwing you over. To other players, please note that this is my personal opinion, to which I have a perfect right, and sneering fanboy injunctions to "git gud" will be gleefully ignored.įirst, Rimworld often feels malicious.
So I spent some time making note of what's annoying me over the last few games and I hope it might be some use to the developer. Still, instead of falling into a pit while holding a cockatrice corpse and feeling eager to start a new character with what I've learned from dying, I often find myself either switching Rimworld off in annoyance, savescumming, or even hacking the save file. I enjoy a challenging game and I've been playing roguelikes for 20+ years so I'm no stranger to unfairness in games.
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